Long before Jimi Hendrix played the Pacific Coliseum on September 7, 1968, he had a Vancouver connection.
Jimi Hendrix played the Pacific Coliseum on September 7, 1968. Four years after the Beatles and 11 years after Elvis Presley played Empire Stadium and changed music forever. The difference was that Jimi had a Vancouver connection—his grandmother Nora Hendrix, a one-time vaudeville dancer who moved to Vancouver in 1911 with her husband Ross Hendrix, a former Chicago cop and raised three children. Al, the youngest moved to Seattle at 22, met 16-year-old Lucille, and Jimi was born in 1942.
Nora Hendrix lived at 827 East Georgia between 1938 and 1952. Photo: CVA 786-4736 1978
According to Jimi Hendrix, the Man, the Magic, the Truth, a biography published in 2004, Jimi lived in 14 different places, including short stints in Vancouver. “I’d always look forward to seeing Gramma Nora, my dad’s mother in Vancouver, usually in the summer. I’d pack some stuff in a brown sack, and then she’d buy me new pants and shirts and underwear. I kept getting taller and growing out of all my clothes, and my shoes were always a falling-apart disgrace. Gramma would tell me little Indian stories that had been told to her when she was my age. I couldn’t wait to hear a new story. She had Cherokee blood. So did Gramma Jeter. I was proud of that, it was in me too.”
Dawson Annex, Burrard and Barclay Streets, demolished 1969. Courtesy VSB
According to the Vancouver School Board Archives and Heritage, in 1949, Jimi attended grade 1 at the West End’s Dawson Annex while living at Nora’s house on East Georgia. “It was a long distance to the school so he probably took the bus or streetcar since the fare was only five cents,” notes the VSB.
Shortly after Hendrix left the army in 1962, he hitchhiked 2,000 miles to Vancouver and stayed several weeks with Nora. He picked up some cash sitting in with a group at a local club on Davie Street, now a gay nightclub called Celebrities.*
Now Celebrities Nightclub, 1022 Davie Street was called Dantes Inferno in the ’60s. Courtesy Places that Matter.
Six years later, when Jimi Hendrix Experience played the Pacific Coliseum, one reviewer described the band as “bigger than Elvis.” Hendrix, dressed all in white, played hits such as “Fire,” “Hey Joe,” and “Voodoo Child.” At one point he acknowledged his grandmother, who sat in the audience, and launched into “Foxy Lady.”
In 2002, Vincent Fodera renovated the building at Union and Main Street and found dishes and a stove that he believes came from Vie’s Chicken and Steak House, part of Hogan’s Alley where Nora once worked as a cook. Seven years later Fodera opened a shrine for the dead rock star. Locals told him that Jimi used the space for rehearsals and sex.
When Jimi played the Pacific Coliseum in 1968 he was 25. Just over two years later, the man widely recognized as one of the most creative and influential musicians of the 20th century was dead.
1022 Davie Street was designed by architect Thomas Hooper for the Lester Dancing Academy in 1911. Hooper also designed the Victoria Public Library, and Munro’s Books Building in Victoria. And in 1912, the same year he designed Hycroft in Shaughnessy, Vancouver’s Winch Building and submitted plans for UBC, he designed Christina Haas’s, Cook Street brothel
This is an occasional series that asks people who love history and heritage to tell us their favourite existing building and the one that never should have been torn down.
603 Manchester Road in Victoria’s Burnside-Gorge neighbourhood
Patrick A. Dunae is a Victoria-born historian. A past member of the City of Victoria Heritage Advisory Panel, he is currently president of the Friends of the BC Archives.
Favourite Building:
One of my favourite houses is an unprepossessing, colonial-style bungalow on Manchester Road. The house was built in 1908 by Charles Deacon, who had emigrated from England with his family six years earlier, and became the foreman of a Rock Bay sawmill. I like the design and proportions of the house; and I applaud the current owners for painting the exterior a warm yellow, a colour that was popular when the house was built. This is an unfashionable part of Victoria and old houses like this are at risk. Kudos to City of Victoria Heritage Planners, who have recommended that the 600 block of Manchester and adjacent Dunedin Street, be designated as a Heritage Conservation Area. The proposal still needs to be approved by homeowners. Fingers crossed.
The Coburn family home at 2640 Blanshard, an Italianate-style house built in 1898.
The one that got away:
In the 1960s when “urban renewal” was popular and local authorities were eradicating “blighted areas,” Victoria City council used the program to demolish nearly 160 houses in its Rose-Blanshard Renewal Scheme. This “blighted” area consisted of houses built in the 1890s and early 1900s. Rose Street was its centre and North Ward School (1894), a four-storey brick structure, was a landmark. The school and neighbouring residences were demolished so that Blanshard Street could be widened to benefit motorists travelling from the new BC ferry terminal. Properties were expropriated, and occupants who refused to leave their homes were forcibly evicted. The Coburn family home was the last house standing when it was bulldozed in March 1969. It was replaced with Blanshard Court, a “low income housing estate,” now called Evergreen Terrace.
The Royal Bank building at 1108 Government St. in Victoria photographed in 1949 (BC Archives I-02169). The building was in disrepair when purchased by bookseller Jim Munro in 1984. The carved lettering in the granite facade above the entrance now read Munro’s Books of Victoria.
My daily workplace is a magnificent former bank building. The Edwardian-era former Royal Bank of Canada at 1108 Government St. was in terrible disrepair when purchased (against his banker’s advice) by Jim Munro in 1984. He returned the structure to its former glory, notably removing a suspended ceiling added as part of a modernizing renovation in the 1950s. Today, tapered pilasters and a cast-plaster coffer ceiling attract tourists from around the globe eager to visit a bookstore co-founded in 1963 by future Nobel laureate Alice Munro. Designed in 1909 by local architect Thomas Hooper as a Temple Bank in the Classical Revival style, with an all-granite facade including two impressive Doric columns, Munro’s Books remains a temple to a commerce less pecuniary than literary.
Exhibition Building, Willows Fairgrounds, Oak Bay (Victoria) (BCArchives H-02390)
The one that got away:
In 1899, a grand exhibition hall with an adjacent horse racing track was built on farmland in Oak Bay. The roof stood 56 feet above the ground with central octagonal towers reaching to a height of 100 feet. An open cupola topped the impressive building, which dominated the Willows Fairgrounds like a manor house amid verdant lawns.
Among the visitors to the exhibition hall, which boasted 20,000 square feet of floor space surrounded by galleries, was the future King George V.
The building and the streetcar connection, that now extended from Royal Jubilee Hospital to the fairgrounds, spurred the growth of Oak Bay, which incorporated as a municipality in 1906. Alas, the building was destroyed by fire in 1907, to be replaced by a warehouse structure of little merit. The site of the fairgrounds was subdivided into housing after the Second World War with 10 acres reserved for Carnarvon Park.
Emily Carr’s Oak Bay cabin on Foul Bay Road. Eve Lazarus photo, 2012
Eve Lazarus is a journalist, author and blogger who has a passion for unconventional history and a fascination with murder. She is the author of Cold Case Vancouver.
Favourite Building:
Emily Carr paid $900 for a plot of land on Victoria Avenue in 1913, and according to a story built the cottage “nail by nail” with the help of “one old carpenter.” After a bit of digging it turns out the carpenter was Thomas Cattarall, who built Craigdarroch for the Dunsmuir family and worked on Hatley Castle. In 1995, new owners wanted to build a house on the property but didn’t want to destroy the little cottage. Terry Tallentire stepped in, paid the city $1.00, spent another $4,000 to move it to her house, and it now lives behind a Samuel Maclure designed house on Foul Bay Road. (The full story is in Sensational Victoria).
The Wilson mansion at 730 Burdett Avenue, Victoria
The one that got away:
There are many reasons why Victoria should have saved the Wilson Mansion, but perhaps the best one is because its social history is just so eccentric. There’s the overprotective father who surrounded it with high walls, Jane, the daughter who kept exotic birds in the attic and owned a 100 pairs of white gloves. And there’s the beneficiary of her will in 1949—Louis, a macaw parrot from South America, who was then in his eighties. Jane named Wah Wong, the Chinese gardener as trustee and parrot keeper, and the terms of the will stated that the property could not be sold while the birds were still alive. The feathered tenants managed to stave off developers until 1966, when it was bulldozed to make way for the Chateau Victoria Hotel.
I was so sad to hear of Jim Munro’s death last Monday. Jim was a huge promoter and lover of books, heritage buildings, art and authors, including of course, his first wife the Nobel prize winner Alice Munro.
He was also a lovely man. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim a few years back when I was researching Sensational Victoria. Because my book was about the stories of people filtered through the houses where they lived and the heritage buildings where they worked, I was fascinated by both Jim Munro’s home and Munro’s Books, the building that he turned into a destination.
Jim told me that in 1966 he fell in love with a house in Rockland that was asking $33,000, and likely designed by the infamous Francis Rattenbury. The house had been turned into a duplex and was in rough shape, but Jim could see the potential, and managed to get the owners down to $20,000. Alice wrote Dance of the Happy Shades, a 1968 Governor General award winner in an upstairs room, and followed that with her bestselling Lives of Girls and Women. The Munro’s divorced in 1972 and Alice moved back to Ontario.
Rockland Avenue house
In 1977, Jim married textile artist Carole Sabiston in what the family called the “chapel” because of the stained-glass effect Jim had painted around the windows and for his old pump organ that still sits under the staircase. Jim played Purcell’s Trumpet Voluntary on the organ before the wedding.
“I marry artists,” Jim told me “and I love heritage buildings.”
Margaret Drabble, Ian McEwan, Vikram Seth, Jane Urquhart, Carol Shields and Simon Winchester, were just a few of the literary greats that have visited the house.
Carole kindly showed me through the house and garden. Both are beautiful and quirky. There is a wall of wearable art—everything from straw hats to top hats. One corner of a room has a key collection—big iron keys to tiny clock keys collected from flea markets around the world. Another corner has a collection of carpet beaters. Out in the garden, Carole created the Philosopher’s Walk for Jim with a bust of Voltaire.
Carole added a studio that’s connected to the house by a glazed passage. It was here that she created the dramatic five-panel work of mountains and ocean that hangs in Government House, as well as perhaps her most publicly accessible work: eight large banners depicting the seasons that hang in Munro’s Books on Government Street.
In 1984, Jim bought the Royal Bank building, designed by Thomas Hooper, the same architect who designed Hycroft in Shaughnessy, the Victoria Public Library, Roger’s Chocolate building and Christina Haas’s Cook Street Brothel.
“No one wanted a used bank building except me,” he said. “People thought I was insane because in those days there weren’t huge bookstores like there are now, but people who buy books also appreciate art and beautiful buildings.”
In December 2012 Jim invited me to have a Victoria launch at Munro’s and hang out with a bunch of local authors that included Kit Pearson, Sheryl McFarlane and Bill Gaston. Two years later he retired and handed over the keys and inventory to four long-time staffers. That same year he received the Order of Canada.
I wrote about the Garden family a couple of weeks back. William and Mary Garden arrived in Vancouver in 1889, opened up the Garden and Sons Wholesale Tea and Coffee on East Hastings, and lived for a time at a house at Thurlow and Alberni. William died suddenly in 1897, and it appears that the “Sons” had other ideas, because the business disappeared from the directories the following year.
Jack Garden, back row fourth from the left with members of the Vancouver Photography Club. Photo courtesy Anders Falk
John (known as Jack) became a lumber broker and he was also an avid photographer. And that was lucky for us, because he shot some of these wonderful photos of early Vancouver. When he wasn’t taking photos, he was likely hanging out at the rowing club—this ca.1910 photo of the rowing club was one of his photos.
Vancouver Rowing Club. Photo courtesy Anders Falk
It was also Jack who took this photograph of his parents on what looks like really large tricycles.
William and Mary Garden family in Stanley Park mid-1890s. Photo courtesy Anders Falk
Jack’s younger brother William was a musician who worked at the Bay as his day job. In the 1920s William played piano in the house band at Lester Court at 1022 Davie Street. Thomas Hooper designed the building in 1911 for the Lester Dance Academy.
Hooper was a highly regarded architect, and his buildings included Hycroft in Shaughnessy, the Winch building, and at least one brothel. The building has gone through a number of transformations over the years, but mostly stayed in the entertainment business. During the ‘40s it was the Embassy Ballroom, in the ‘60s it was Dante’s Inferno, later it hosted psychedelic bands as Retinal Circus, and since 1982 it’s been a gay joint called Celebrities.
William married Harriet and they raised three kids at a house on Quebec and 30th. One of the sons John (Jack) worked for Ideal Ironworks. He married the boss’s daughter Rose Smith (who also happens to be Anders Falk’s grandma). Another interesting connection to Vancouver’s history is that Rose’s brother Douglas Smith engineered the “gravity driven falling ball drive” on the Gastown Steam Clock—his name is on the plaque.
I’d like to thank Catherine Falks for naming her son Anders and not William or John/Jack.
In 1912, when it was tough for a woman to make a decent living, Christina Haas arrived in Victoria and bought herself a brothel.
Christina Haas commissioned Thomas Hooper to design her Cook Street brothel in 1913. Eve Lazarus photo, 2012
Thomas Hooper once had the largest architectural practice in Western Canada. He designed hundreds of buildings including the Victoria Public Library, the Rogers Chocolates and the Munro’s Books Building in Victoria. And in 1912, the same year he designed Hycroft in Shaughnessy, Vancouver’s Winch Building and submitted plans for UBC, he designed Christina Haas’s, Cook Street brothel.
This is an excerpt from my chapter on the Red Light District in Sensational Victoria.
Cook Street Brothel:
It’s a gorgeous four-square house built in the Classic Revival style. According to the real estate blurb it was remodeled into a five-suite apartment complex in 1945 and it’s the first time the house has been on the market in 55 years. The going price is just under $2 million.
Christina is a shadowy figure. She arrived from California in 1912 at the age of 50 and took over an established brothel on Broughton Street with a steady clientele from the Union Club and Driard Hotel. Business was booming and she decided to move into a more upscale facility in Fairfield. She paid cash for the two lots and took out a building permit in her name and commissioned Hooper to design her brothel.
Thomas Hooper:
Although there is no mention of the Cook Street house in his portfolio, the blueprints are signed by the architect and bear his address. They show a house with three bedrooms, each with a separate entrance and its own bathroom. There are rumours that a secret door once led to a concealed wine cellar.
Neighbours tell stories passed down over the years. The women who worked at the Cook Street brothel wore business attire, and several married, raised families, and went about the rest of their respectable lives ignoring the occasional raised eyebrow and whisper.
Brothel changes hands:
Christina is listed as the owner of the property in the city directories until 1920. The brothel then sold to John Day, a wealthy businessman, and his wife, Eliza Amelia. Day owned the Esquimalt Hotel until it burned down in 1914. He also managed the Silver Springs Brewery and later the Phoenix Brewery. Eliza sold the house after his death in 1944.
Even after Day bought the Cook Street house, his tax notices were sent to Christina’s other brothel on Broughton Street, suggesting that he may have had an ownership stake in both.
Christina’s nephew Earl tells me his aunt sold all her brothel holdings in Victoria in 1919 and moved to Mendocino County to be near her brother John Henry and his wife Eva in Westport. She died in 1938 at the age of 76, and is buried in the Fort Bragg Rose Memorial Cemetery.
Jimi Hendrix played the Pacific Coliseum on September 7, 1968. Four years after the Beatles and 11 years after Elvis Presley played Empire Stadium and changed music forever. The difference was that Jimi had a Vancouver connection—his grandmother Nora Hendrix, a one-time vaudeville dancer who moved to Vancouver in 1911 with her husband Ross Hendrix, a former Chicago cop and raised three children. Al, the youngest moved to Seattle at 22, met 16-year-old Lucille, and Jimi was born in 1942.
